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Extend Requirement Properties
A project might apply further properties to a requirement, such as cost, lateness penalty or risk to the business if not met. You can add these properties to specific Requirement elements, or configure them to be automatically available in all Requirement elements on creation, using Tagged Values. (These are sometimes referred to as User-defined attributes.)
Extended element properties are not visible unless you open the Tagged Values window for the element. Alternatively, you can display the additional properties on the element image on its diagrams.
Add Tagged Values to Existing Requirements
To add a property to a single Requirement as a Tagged Value, simply click on the Requirement, display the Tagged Values window (), and enter the name of the property as the tag name and the value of the property as the tag value.
It is likely that any property you add to one Requirement would also apply to others. You might therefore use a predefined Tagged Value Type to identify your Requirement property, so that you can select it whenever required. The predefined Tagged Value Type also enables you to define specific values for the Tagged Value.
If the appropriate predefined Tagged Value Type does not exist, a Technology Developer can create it to add to the structured tags, reference tags, or customized tags collections.
Configure Requirements to be Created with Extended Properties
If it is necessary to create all Requirements with the same extended set of properties, you can create a Requirement Template diagram and either create a special Requirement that defines those properties (as Tagged Values), or drag an existing Requirement with those properties onto the diagram. You then set the Requirement Template diagram as the template for all new Requirement elements, so that those new Requirements automatically have all of the properties you want.
However, this then excludes other Requirement element formats, including the standard Requirement format. If you want to use another Requirement format, you have to replace or cancel the current Template. Alternatively, you can create a Profile.
A Profile also defines exactly what a new Requirement element should contain, and how it should display in diagrams. However, a Profile is a collection of alternative element definitions, so it does not override the default Requirement format, nor does it prevent you from defining several different types of Requirement element. You can therefore have separate and parallel definitions of elements for business requirements, system requirements, project requirements, or any other category of requirement you decide to work with.
For information on importing and using existing Profile files, see the Using UML Profiles Help topic. For information on creating new Profiles, see the Developing Profiles Help topic.
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